today I'll be doing a quick unboxing of the Corsair cooling air series A50 so
this is a performance CPU Cooler not to be confused with what I have over here
which is the a70 which is classified as a high
performance CPU Cooler so this is performance this is high performance
there are a couple of key differences so what I'll probably end up doing is uh
taking them both out to do a quick comparison for for you they both feature
a 2-year warranty as well as compatibility with LGA 775 1156 1366
core core am3 am2 and
am3 as well as compatibility with 120 mm
fans Corsair's 120 mil fans are generally pretty good quality so I'd
expect this one to be much more of the same you can either select 1600 or 2,000
RPM on the fan and here we
have a little performance perance graph compared to your stock cooler I can't
help but wonder what stock cooler they were using oh here we go core i7 965
processor running at stock 3.2 GHz so um actually the LGA
1366 cooler that comes with the 965 is a pretty decent cooler so if it
outperforms that one by a significant margin you can rest assured it will
outperform your 1156 775 or AMD stock
cooler so let's take the packaging off just like this look at that I didn't
need a knife at all
I still zoomed in oh yeah that's why you can't see what I'm doing here we go a
much better so the box is actually similar in
size to the a70 but a little bit shorter
okay so you got about H about 2 to 3 cm
there in terms of extra shortness or
less length if you prefer they're both the same sideways Dimensions so it's not
really bigger in that regard go ahead and open up the top here have a look at
what's inside with the a70 I tried to guess what was inside all the boxes this
time hopefully I'll be a little bit more accurate okay I'm going to guess that in
here is
accessories of some
sort oh boy sure wish I could get this stuff out of here that would there we go
all right so Inside the Box we will
find something to get the box out of the
light we will find all of the accessories so we have a 120 mm fan
which comes with their uh shroud SL clip
that I actually really like it makes fan mounting a breeze and it's also got nice
anti vibration rubber grommets um mounting the fan to the frame we've also
got the am2 am3 hold
down thermal compound thumb screws rubber washers and a fan speed adapter
fan speed well fan noise reduction adapter so that'll turn your fan speed
down presumably to, 1600 RPM here's a Corsair Solutions guide outlining all of
their different solutions including memory Solutions cooling solutions power
chassis USB and Storage Solutions it's gotten to the point where uh as per
their dream machine campaign you can actually almost build a PC entirely out
of Corsair parts so here's their back plate for Intel here's a little plastic
piece to keep the uh motherboard components on the back from being
shorted out you can adjust these clips here to go from 775 to 1156 to 1366
quite easily and then there's a hold down for the top side along with some
screws perfect so that's all of our mounting accessories as well as our fan
accessories I'm going to hold on to the fan for now put that in there yeah there we go
hold onto the fan and let's have a look at the cooler itself so it comes packed
in foam just like that it comes with a
little uh quick start guide which which I guess shows you how to install it on
the socket of your choice that's too much thermal compound I would probably put on about half of that but uh A+ for
effort of course there I mean they're not wrong the only disadvantage is that
you're going to get some thermal goop around the edges of your CPU and like
it's kind of it's kind of hard to clean off of there it won't damage anything
but it's just a pain when you're trying to clean off the CPU to I don't know put
it back in a box or or whatever it is you need to do do not return this
product to the store corser wants to cover all of the technical support
customer service Etc themselves don't
eat this and then we have the cooler so it's
quite a bit smaller than the a70 right off the bat you've got the same black
top that I really liked on the a70 so you've got three heat pipes coming up
through it and then instead of seeing a standard silver or chromed top you've
got a nice black one which will go really well with the black interior and
of course their 800d the fins are quite tightly spaced but as long as the fan
has reasonably good static pressure which it better because it's I believe
the same one that they're using on the H50 then you should get fairly good
performance out of it that way the fan Clips on that easily that's how hard it
is so you just clip it on and then you
can pull it off and clip it on and pull it off but it is secure enough that it's
not just going to fall off so here if I take the heat sink and shake it around
like if it was being shipped on a truck
there it doesn't fall off excellent all right I was hoping it wouldn't fall off
then we've got the bottom of the heat sink so this is where we see it is a
heat pipe direct touch heat sink so that oh that was bad that means that it will
survive a fall from approximately 6 in
above the table and it will not be damaged because it is engineered like
that okay so I'm just distracting you right now while I pull the a70 out of
its box so that I can do a quick comparison against its little brother
the A50 here we
are all right it looks a lot bigger but it's not actually that much bigger it's
just because of the additional bulk from the fans I mean it's a little bit bigger
but anyway let's finish off with the A50 here so I'll do the obligatory finger
shot it's not all that shiny but it does look quite flat although my uh my
unmeasured appearance om meter is not
going to give us too good an indication of that but I would expect it to be
reasonably well manufactured I mean that is one of the things that is tough about
heat pipe direct touch though is that when you're manufacturing you do have to
make sure that it is aligned completely precisely all of the heat pipes and that
they are aligned precisely with the base because what you do is you assemble the
whole thing mush it all together and then you have to actually flatten the
whole thing as a whole so if you go too far you'll go inside the heat pipes heat
pipes are not solid they are Hollow and usually full of some kind of a a gas SL
liquid cuz that's what allows it to transfer heat so quickly so if you go
too far you puncture a heat pipe rendering the whole thing useless and if
you don't go far enough then you're going to lose some of the efficiency of
actually having the heat sink directly on top of the heat spreader of the
CPU oh look oh there's cor our logos on
uh on on the bottom too there's a nice Finishing Touch for you you'll never see
it in all likelihood but it's there you'll it's there and that'll make you
feel better okay so here we are we can compare the two heat sinks against each
other so the first thing you'll notice in terms of difference is that the a70
looks much bigger because of the big fan I already mentioned that the next thing
you'll notice is that it has more heat pipes so it has 33% more heat pipes and
in theory 33% more performance although it probably doesn't quite work out that
way let's just um strip the fans off them so you can see just how much
thicker it is I can also tell already that it has quite a bit more surface
area in terms of fins too because what they've done with the uh with the A50 is
they've actually gone a little bit okay yeah you can see it has a slightly
different shape to it
so no you can't really see that okay I guess the only difference here is that
the A50 only has the one side that you can clip the fan to that's kind of
interesting so rather than being shaped the same on both sides like the a70
because the a70 is designed to have a fan clip to either side you can see clip
Marks here here here and here the A50
can only accept a fan on the one side this side is actually flat that's why it
looked like there was actually less thin material on this side of the heat pipes
to me but it's not actually the case although it is quite a bit thinner so
you know what I'm it's hard to say how much performance difference you'd see
but um maybe I'll have to actually test these and find out just how well they do
maybe I'll test them against the uh Co gauge Arrow here which is this enormous
monstrosity thing it's um
yeah okay well enough speculation they both use nice fat 8mm heat pipes so
that's a really good thing to see so even though this one only is a three
heat pipe cooler it's going to do quite a bit better than a uh heat pipe cooler
that uses only 6 mm heat pipes thank you for checking out my unboxing of the
Corsair A50 CPU heat sink and I hope you
enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe both to Linus Tech tips as well as NCC
my other official NC Channel and thank you for watching